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Hi, and welcome to part III of the ongoing debate, "Why the h*ll do some SEOmoz profiles have PR and others don't?" If you are unfamiliar with this question, you read about parts I and II.

As an intro I would like to say that I was very glad to see all the discussion around this issue, but I was also intrigued not to see very clear answers from anyone. Sure, SEO is not a precise science, but I was hoping someone could have a better perception of what was going on.

The hypothesis

Some said that you needed a X number of links to score a PR and that the position of your comments was essential to getting PR.

Darren, on part II, suggested a lot of these factors, and gave more relevance to number of comments and external links.

I have PR on my profile page!

I was unconvinced that the number of comments had anything to do with getting PR. To get PR you need to be indexed, and have links pointing at your page. And since most (or even all) internal links in SEOmoz are nofollowed, you need at least one external link.

And in a couple weeks the page was indexed (no surprise there), but with a PR of 4! So is Google counting nofollow links for PR reason, if a page does finally get indexed? I know for sure that the external link was decisive, but that doesn't explain why I go from zero to 4.

I guess we can put this to rest now. Comments and other links do play a role in this PR distribution, but only if your page is indexed - by then Google counts links, follow and nofollow, to compute toolbar PR.

Carfeu loves jogging and hunting bears (do the math). As a day job he's the resident SEO/PPC master/apprentice at Search Marketing in Portugal.

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Comments
13

You know I got nothin' but love for ya, brother, but I'm afraid I have to kick your ass for this post. =)

The reason is... you are missing a LOT of important details about PageRank in general, and it's preventing you from getting a deep understanding of what's going on with the profiles.

First of all, your profile jumped to a PR4 for the same reason mine did: Google recently updated the Toolbar PageRank (TBPR). It sounds like you're unaware of the relationship between Google's internal PR and the Toolbar PR. The internal PR values are used to rank pages, and they are constantly updating. The TBPR values simply represent the internal PR values on a scale of 0-10, but the Toolbar is only updated about every 3 or 4 months. So between TBPR updates, your profile page was building up internal PR the whole time, but you have no way of knowing that until Google updated the Toolbar.

The same thing applies to the results of a [link:] search in Google. Before an update, you might get 0 results that link to your profile page, and after the update, suddenly Google shows that you have 7 links. That doesn't mean that 7 pages all linked to you yesterday, nor does it mean that Google wasn't giving you credit for those links--all it means is that Google is giving you a snapshot of the data that it uses and updates every day.

Second of all, you don't seem to realize which SEOmoz links are nofollowed. You said "most (or even all) internal links in SEOmoz are nofollowed," but that's just not true. Every comment you leave on a blog post contains a FOLLOWED link to your profile. The more posts you comment on, the more links you will have going to your profile. It's that simple.

The reason I know which links are followed/nofollowed is because I have a Firefox add-on, called SEOQuake, that puts a line through nofollowed links. So I can tell which links are followed or nofollowed, just by looking at the page (EXAMPLE). I recommend you check it out (there are other add-ons that do the same thing, but I like SEOQuake for its other features too).

I suppose I'll still give you a thumbs up, but consider this a warning. =)

You know I am getting this vibe lately about SEO, I don't think understanding any of the agorithms completely help. The internet is too vast for an algorithm of any sort to properly spide the internet.

Just imagine needing A B C D and E to rank perfectly, having any combo but not all ranking you fairly well. I've had sites that should in theory not be any where near the top rank extremely well with out A B C D or E.

Though I have seen improving websites increase there rank so I know it works.

I think trying to figure out why any page ranks where it does is virtually an impossible task there are just too many what if and luck of the draw type scenarios.

Google probably has a bunch of Monkey's left over from NASA's space program rolling 10 sided dice every 3-4 months when they do a PR update and that's how they decide lol.

And if it is indeed as you say in the post, this YOUMoz post just got a juicy link from the comments of the latest post by Rand. Which in turn should pass some “toolbar PageRank” to your (and hopefully mine) member profile page.

Sorry for the poor choice of the anchor text though. And disclaimer, the above link totally adds value to the discussion and adds to user experience ;-)

Well this been one hell of a nofollow day for me. First the discussions about nofollow in the comments for Rand’s post titled, Nailing the Coffin Shut on the "Don't Link to External Sites" Philosophy and now this post.

I have never searched so much about nofollow in one single day (actually night, it is 1.00 am here in India).

I just quoted Matt Cutts, in a one of the comments of the above mentioned blog post by Rand, as follows

There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

Well there are at least 2 experiments out there on the web, which claim that nofollow is used by Google for discovery. But really couldn’t bring myself to trust the bloggers.

[ Now I not going to link to them. Just in case nofollow turned out tobe totally something else ;-) ]

For the first blog has only one line in the about page and doesn’t reveal anything about the blogger.

And for the second blog, how do you trust somebody who shows a girl in lingerie saying ‘Make Money at Home’ in the blog header.

Does any of the fellow mozzers know about some ‘credible’ experiment (apart from this YOUMoz post of course) about what really Google does in case of nofollow links. Especially nofollow links on the pages from ‘authority domains’ such as SEOMoz.

Update:

And by the way SEOMoz has some problems. It is letting me post this comment but it is not allowing me to Thumb your post up. I even logged out and logged in once again to do just that. Sorry for that. The post really rocks.

I have had a suscpicion that G also uses nofollow - and in a recent suspected case, uses the anchor text from no follow. Now dont string me up for saying that, but it happens - I am not sure how true it is... could be an isolated event.

Surely that could be extremely easily tested - just put up a page that's linked to from nowhere, post a comment on someones "nofollow" blog linking with some obscure anchor text then come back & query Google for it a week or so later. Maybe I'll give it a fly.

Would say my understanding of "nofollow" is that it simply doesn't pass juice. No doubt Google just can't resist having a peek at what's being linked to - would you ;)

Also, did notice Mr Slattens profile page jumped to PR4 at the update the other week. What it must be to be the "greatest" ;)

I have a strong feeling that google does look at Links that comes from Good Websites even though it is Nofollowed.My Company website has 2,277 backlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer, but Google Webmaster Tools shows only 1,938 Backlinks...

Both sites include links from a comment I made on Matt Cutts Blog and a few other sites where I'm a member and have a nofollow for my Website in the profile.

So I guess they don't literally not follow "nofollows" but instead follow and keep them in mind while ranking but the importance given is far less than a followed one.